Speech #1100052978

So on one hand. corporate America says: Oh. my goodness. we cant find people as professionals to fill these jobs. but amazingly enough. wages have gone down for college graduates from 2000 to 2004 by 5 percent. Maybe somebody is not trying hard enough to find American workers to fill these jobs. In truth. what many of us have come to understand is that these H113 visas are not being used to supplement the American workforce where we have shortages but. rather. H11B visas are being used to replace American workers with lower cost foreign workers. There are studies which conclude that H lB workers earn less than what U.S. workers make in similar jobs at similar locations. According to the Center for Immigration Studies. wages for H11B workers average $12.000 a year below the median wage for U.S. workers in computer fields. Another study by Programmers Guild found that foreign tech workers who came to the United States with H lB visas are paid about $25.000 a year less than American workers with the same skill. According to the GAO: Some employers said that they hired HlB workers in part because these workers would often accept lower salaries than similarly qualified U.S. workers. What is very important to mention here is that some in corporate America are giving the impression that most of the jobs within the H11B program are for highly specialized technical work which just cant be found in the United States. The truth is that most of the HlB visas go to people who do not have a Ph.D.. who do not have a masters degree. but only have a bachelors degree. a plain old college degree. In todays Congress Daily. there is a very insightful article on HlB visas which is relevant to this debate: As Ron Hira. a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. points out . .. the Labor Department acknowledges that H1lB workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job. and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of a foreign worker.~I The article goes on to state: The median wage for new H113 computing professionals was $50.000 in 2005. far below the median for U.S. computing professionals. according to the annual report of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. These findings are extremely troubling given the promises made to the American people that the future for our economy was with highskilled. highpaying. hightech jobs. What we have found is that in the last 4 years. wages for college graduates are going down. and we are finding that people from abroad are coming in and doing jobs American professionals can do and they are doing them for lower wages. To bolster their argument for increased HlB visas. proponents point to a study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics about the jobs of the future. That is what it is entitled. "Jobs of the Future." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. over the next decade. 2 million jobs will be created in mathematics. engineering. computer science. and physical science. That equates to about 200.000 jobs a year times 102 million jobs. Under this legislation. the number of HlB3 visas would increase to as many as 180.000 a year. That means virtually every jobabout 90 percentthat will be created in the hightech sector over the next 10 years could conceivably be taken by a HlB visa holder. What sense does that make? What are we telling our young people?